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admit that the club serves as much of a social need for them than as a serious investment club. One way you know this is true is to check the actual amount invested by each member to the group effort. It is often relatively quite small. In other words, these clubs satisfy social needs as much as investment needs. |
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Reducing the Isolation Factor |
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To cope with the isolation that accompanies trading from a home office, there are a number of avenues the investor has available to connect to others. These are through cyberspace as well as face-to-face contact. It is a good idea for the serious investor who spends a lot of time alone at the computer to take advantage of both of these ways of connecting to others. |
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What we want to do is try and balance the need for contact with others who are also trading and investing, on the one hand, with the danger of overdoing our hunger for gathering information about trading and the market. When contact is too focused on trading tactics, software, etc., it becomes one more way for us to end up overwhelmed with all the information coming our way. Later in this chapter, we will identify in more detail the ways we become overloaded with information. |
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So, it is useful for us to distinguish between the need for contact to gather information and compare experiences, on the one hand, and the social need to be with others, where money and the market are not primarily the focus, on the other. |
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Meeting with others needs to be for social contact more than for gathering stock tips or other information. While the exchange of market-related information may or may not be part of the interaction, the investor needs to keep in mind that it is the contact itself that is important, not so much the content of it. |
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This is why it is so crucial to have people in your life who can help turn you away from trading, the economy, or anything having to do with making money. Avoiding having anything to do with the market and making money is not as easy for some as it might first appear. |
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One of the occupational hazards for active traders and serious investors is the insidiously seductive nature of the market itself. The fascination that we may develop for it, especially when it is going our way, can make other things seem less interesting. So we may spend more and more time on the Internet with market and |
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